Change "No items selected" to "n items in this view" (item count, number of items, statistics)
Valuable UI real estate in the right pane is currently wasted when no items are selected — it shows the uninformative message "No items selected". A much-requested piece of information that would be rather more relevant here is the number of items in the current view. Currently the only way to get that is to get into the middle pane and do a "select all" operation.
Proposal: Show item count in the right pane when no items are selected. The basic implementation could just have "n items in this view". A more sophisticated implementation would be context aware, with different wordings: n items with this tag, n items in this collection, n items in this library, n items found (for search results), etc.
Many people haved asked for items counts to be more easily available. I believe I have found a piece of UI clutter here (the "No items selected" phrase) that can be turned into a supremely useful piece of information and so make many users happy.
Proposal: Show item count in the right pane when no items are selected. The basic implementation could just have "n items in this view". A more sophisticated implementation would be context aware, with different wordings: n items with this tag, n items in this collection, n items in this library, n items found (for search results), etc.
Many people haved asked for items counts to be more easily available. I believe I have found a piece of UI clutter here (the "No items selected" phrase) that can be turned into a supremely useful piece of information and so make many users happy.
http://forums.zotero.org/discussion/1218/item-count-in-collections/
http://forums.zotero.org/discussion/1297/library-and-subfolder-counts/
http://forums.zotero.org/discussion/6114/how-many-records-in-my-database/
http://forums.zotero.org/discussion/3791/number-of-references/
http://forums.zotero.org/discussion/19335/library-metadata/
http://forums.zotero.org/discussion/13341/number-of-items-in-a-collection/
http://forums.zotero.org/discussion/11117/number-of-items-in-collection/
http://forums.zotero.org/discussion/9288/item-preview-and-number-of-items-in-the-library/
http://forums.zotero.org/discussion/8644/feature-request-library-statistics/
http://forums.zotero.org/discussion/2484/library-summaries/
http://forums.zotero.org/discussion/6578/citation-count/
http://forums.zotero.org/discussion/1218/item-count-in-collections/
http://forums.zotero.org/discussion/7282/item-numbers/
http://forums.zotero.org/discussion/5033/propertiesstatstitics-of-collections/
I created an issue at github for this
https://github.com/zotero/zotero/issues/12
Another frequent request is "How can I see what collections my item is in?". This message (taken from the documentation) could be displayed in the right pane too:
« To see all the collections an item is in, select the item and then hold down the “Option” key (Mac OS X), “Control” key (Windows), or “Alt” key (Linux). This will highlight all collections that contain the selected item. »
Gracile: I don't think so. I agree that the collections-containing feature needs better discoverability, but adding documentation messages to core UI isn't a good solution. (A guidance panel, as Mark has suggested, might work, if we can figure out a trigger.) In any case, better to discuss that elsewhere.